Now that they were getting closer to their destination, the senior officers had decided to conduct the operation brief, the brief going down last night, Monday evening after dinner. The department heads and junior officers were, to a man, still reeling from the disclosures made at the brief.
An Iranian diesel boat, cut in half and a liquid metal-cooled nuclear reactor shoehorned in, a fast reactor that could become unstable and blow itself apart in a superheated radioactive cloud or worse, detonate in a small nuclear explosion, if the word “small” could ever be applied to a fission bomb explosion. A reactor so potentially dangerous that the Russian designers wouldn’t even test it in their vast wilderness or their backyard Arctic Ocean, but had convinced the Iranians to take it to sea and test it for them, dangling in front of the Iranians having a nuclear-powered attack submarine. There was no information on whether Russian technicians would be aboard the Kilo, a boat they’d renamed Panther to coincide with the name of the liquid metal reactor’s design program, “Project Panther.” They would sneak the Panther out of its base at Bandar Abbas eastward through the Gulf of Oman, presumably submerged on batteries or snorkeling on its diesel southward en route the deep Indian Ocean, “the IO,” a thousand miles away from land, where intelligence estimates asserted it would then go to initial criticality on the fast reactor.
And sometime during Panther’s run south through the Arabian Sea on the way to the Indian Ocean, Vermont would sneak up on her and steal her, the same way they’d briefly hijacked the Bigfoot narco-sub. A group of six officers and chiefs would be chosen to lock out of the Vermont after the SEALs had secured the Kilo and rounded up the crew, to run the stolen submarine from the Arabian Sea back the way they’d come, down south into the Indian Ocean, around South Africa and into the South Atlantic, then speed all the way northeast to AUTEC in the Bahamas.
There was tremendous debate in the wardroom about who would be chosen to operate the hijacked submarine. All but Lieutenant Li No wanted to be chosen to conn the Panther back to AUTEC, Pacino first among them. It seemed low probability, he was told, because he didn’t even have his dolphins yet, so why would the captain trust a non-qual to operate a stolen foreign submarine and bring it to the Bahamas?
At midrats, the meal served from 2330 to 0130, usually consisting of something simple but gut-busting, like beanie-weenies over rice, or chili with crackers, the engineer looked over at Spichovich and said, “You know, Weps, only the least useful officers to Vermont will be chosen to go, so the bosses might decide to pick you to go on the Panther. I mean, really, what do you do for a living anyway? Wait for us to shoot one of your missiles? Take inventory of torpedoes daily to make sure no one shoplifted one?”
“No way, Feng,” Spichovich said without looking up from his tablet computer. “Your theory is just your way of coping with the fact that you’ll be left behind on Vermont because, let’s face it, tactically, you suck. I mean, that’s why, at battlestations, you’re just the engineering officer of the watch, splitting atoms and making the screw go roundy-roundy while we adults find the bad guys and put them on the bottom. So no heroics or medals for you. Just keep playing with your reactor. Oh, and as to usefulness, all you and your boys do is stare at gauge needles that don’t move for the entire watch.”
“Yeah, until something breaks, and then you’ll be damned glad I’m useful enough to restore propulsion and get you air to breathe.”
“When it was your incompetence that got it broken in the first place?”
The engineer stood and cocked his fist, but he was grinning.
“Knock it off, you two bastards,” XO Quinnivan said, suppressing a smile.
“So XO, who’s going on the Panther?” Dankleff asked, shoveling a spoonful of rancid-looking chili into his mouth.
“My fookin lips are sealed,” Quinnivan said, pushing his plate away and standing.
“Can’t you at least say what the selection criteria are?”
“I suppose I can say this. It comes down to our opinions of you scurvy junior officers, with maybe some metrics thrown in.
“Metrics, XO?” Dankleff stopped chewing.
“The war game simulation results. Once the Nav gets the simulations staged and ready, we’re going to see how the officers do individually and as a team. Once we see how it goes, we’ll know which round peg to put in which square hole.”
“So, basically you’re just going to draw straws?” Lewinsky grinned.
“Exactly,” Quinnivan said, leaving the wardroom by the forward supply officer’s door.
Reaching Point “Delta” began the simulation phase of the transit. As Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov had said during the op brief, “Our mission failure with the narco-sub began with a failure of imagination. No one thought that the cargo ship would escort the Bigfoot out of the Caribbean Sea, and we didn’t have a contingency plan for that. Which forced us to improvise. And no one imagined Bigfoot would be conned by artificial intelligence. So, on this mission, long before we get to the op-area, we’re going to war game this operation. We’ll split into multiple teams, three blue and three red. Each blue team will play Vermont and give the simulation app their actions and reactions. The red teams will steal the Kilo, the Panther, and upload their actions and reactions to the app. A third group will be the God group, consisting of the captain, XO and me. The God group are observers from high over the earth watching as things happen, with perfect knowledge of what the tactical situation is. The God group will introduce scenarios and glitches to the simulation to see what the red and blue teams will do. The God group will also play the part of any interception force — Iranian or Russian — and upload their actions and reactions to the app. We’re going to churn the assignments and make you switch from red to blue and back, with the roster changed each time, so we can evaluate which team make-up is the most effective. Gentlemen, we will be doing this for five solid days, after which the captain, XO and I will be reviewing the results. From what we see, we’ll reevaluate the op plan and form contingency plans.”
Pacino had volunteered to be on a red team, but Romanov put him on a blue team with Supply Officer Ganghadharan and Electrical Officer Varney. The opposing red team for the first round of simulations included Li “Doctor” No, U-Boat Dankleff and Lobabes Lomax. The first simulation went down promptly at 0800 and concluded just before noon. The second started at 1300 and continued for several hours. Pacino reported for his 1800 to 2400 watch with Spichovich, standing pilot watch for six hours. When the watch was over, he was exhausted, and slept a dreamless sleep until his alarm woke him to go aft and work out.